Hey, you! Yeah YOU!
How come you haven't registered? Have you read about our new blue star program? We are donating $10 of each blue star subscription to the Blue Ribbon Coalition to ensure that we will have trails to recreate on for years to come.
Our blue star comes with all the benefits of a red star such as 10 second searching, blue/red star member only giveaways, access to the private blue/red star member forums, etc.

I love the torchmate forum, it is always full of great tips and advice, now if I would only follow it ! Great advice on backing up drawings and driver settings, pain when you lose them. But hey I have no problems I have a laptop and so does my son, double protection as both are used to run my table....what are the odds of both going down....now the story begins...

Nice weather got a day off, time to go wheeling with my buds...two hours into the trailhead my ham radio at my side, emergency traffic for me on the ham. Go ahead I say, you need to get home I'm told, some fine piece of human waste has kicked in your door to your house ! 3 hours later I get home today.

Long story short two tv's, daughters jewelry and dang it both laptops are gone along with the crooks. I guess I had better start backing up files and settings to an external hard drive and hope it does not get stolen. Stupid crooks left my dongle tho.....:-)

So once I source a new laptop I will figure out how to download tmcad back to it. I'm sure a few calls to torchmate support will be in order to dial back in my settings....

But hey the most important part is nobody was home to get hurt and it's only time and property.....

Sorry no info from me on this thread, but I feel better talking about it :-)

Dave....

Ps: please BOL for two toshiba laptops and tv's in the Manteca, CA area

I have a western digital drive that seems to work really well. I've had a few files that somehow got corrupted and were unable to be opened. Pulled out the drive and retrieved those individual files and I was back in business. The key for me is to remember to actually plug the thing in and back it up to the current date.

There is something called drop box I think. Have not looked into my brother told me its what I wanted tho. He's IT for state farm and I was looking for something I can save stuff to no matter where I am my shop at my tm computer or at home. Off site server that you upload to bit can access anywhere I think. If you work at home its probably nbd but I hate jump drives ( they tend to break when they fall off a table)

Yeah Drop box is a program you download and then upload all your files or folders you choose to the big cloud in the sky. You can only have 2GB of storage unless you sign up a few more people. You can access Dropbox from anywhere there is internet access. It is cool.
Another option is to use Windows Live Mesh, it syncs any folders you designate to upload to the cloud in the sky as well. It is another easy way of keeping your files safe from pending disaster.
I keep too many back ups but better to be safe than sorry.

But my advice is to have 2 back ups just in case Murphy's Law happens and the only copy you have doesn't play ball.

For now, I have a backup drive that I plug into my computer about once a week and copy all my files, I then unhook the drive and it is hidden away. I also have memory sticks, and every couple weeks I update the memory sticks with the new info and also have them hidden away, so 2 backups completly separate from my machine.

What i'm fixing to do is to locate my backup drive into another section of the shop, be it the ceiling, in the wall, the floor, etc. Where ever it is located, it will not be very accessible and it will have some kind of lock box around it. I will then run the wires necessary to attach it to my computer, then I can just back up my computer every night when I shut down.

I have thousands of drawings and files that make my business run, if I lost all that, I have no idea what I would do and I don't fully trust the on line backup system either. Maybe i'm paranoid, but if I can keep my info in a closed loop that I can get to the physical backups myself, if my computer crashed, or if someone were to break in and steal the computer, they would just unhook the lines and take what they could grab, and putting the same programs on a new computer is easy enough, I just need to never loose the files I created with them.

One of the first things i'm creating with my new plasma table is a kick ass desk. I need a bigger desk, I have 4 computers on it right now and it's a bit cluttered. I also need a work area to lay parts on when i'm working with solidworks. I'm going to figure out how to secure my computer to my desk in some kind of enclosure so you can't grab the computer either. At best, they could steel the keyboard and break the monitor, but the computer would be safe......

Good info guys. I will be checking into off site storage once I get up and running again. After cleaning up the crooks mess I'm not sure any hiding spot is safe unless its locked up somewhere. I will definitely take more care with drives and dongles when I'm not home. Thanks for the ideas. Dave

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